The Wool Home

Why wool, and why it was never seasonal

Wool is the material we have lived with longest and understand least.

Most of us could not say what it is made of, why a lambswool throw is so warm, or why a sheepskin rug  left under a chair leg for a decade still comes back when you move the chair. We know it works. We have known for three thousand years. The explanation turns out to be more interesting than the fact.

This month is Wool Month, so we are going to spend it on the fibre. This piece is where it starts.

A sheepskin is mostly air

That is the whole thing, really. Everything wool does well, it does by holding air still.

A single wool fibre is not a smooth filament. It is a structure. The outside is a layer of overlapping scales, like roof tiles, which is why wool sheds a spill rather than drinking it. Inside, the fibre is built from two kinds of cell packed side by side, and they take up moisture at different rates. One swells more than the other. The fibre has no choice but to bend.

It does this over and over along its length, so every fibre grows as a spring rather than a strand. That coiling is called crimp, and it is the reason a fleece has loft: thousands of springs, each holding the next one apart, trapping air between them.

Still air is one of the best insulators available. Wool's achievement is not generating warmth so much as organising emptiness - and then keeping it organised under a hundredweight of furniture, for decades, which is the part no engineered foam has matched.

Warmth that is not stored heat

Here is the part most people have never been told.

Wool takes up moisture vapour from the air - a great deal of it, without ever feeling damp to the hand, because the water is held inside the fibre rather than sitting on it. And as it takes up that moisture, it releases a small amount of heat of its own.

This is not heat it has been saving from earlier. It is heat produced by the act of absorption, at the moment the fibre meets a change in humidity. Walk from a dry hallway onto a sheepskin on a cold morning and the fibre is doing something, not merely sitting there.

The effect is modest. It is not a heating system. But it explains the thing everyone notices and nobody can account for: that a sheepskin is warm under a cold foot and never clammy under a warm one. Synthetic pile cannot do the second half of that. It has nowhere to put the moisture, so the moisture stays on the surface, where you feel it.

Sound, and the rooms we have made

Modern houses are hard. Stone, board, tile, glass, plaster - surfaces chosen to be wiped rather than to be lived against. Sound arrives at them and comes straight back.

Wool absorbs it instead. All that trapped air gives sound somewhere to go, and the fibre converts a little of it to heat rather than returning it to the room. A rug on a hard floor is the least expensive acoustic treatment a room can have, and the only one nobody has to explain to a guest.

If you have ever walked into a room with a large sheepskin down and felt it was calmer before you worked out why, that is what you were hearing. Or rather, not hearing.

Fire, static, odour, air

Four smaller things, each worth knowing.

Wool is difficult to ignite. It has a high water content and a high nitrogen content, and when it does burn it tends to char and stop rather than melt and spread. It does not drip. This is a description of how the fibre behaves, not a safety rating.

It gathers almost no static. The same moisture that makes it warm makes it conductive enough to let charge dissipate, which is why a wool rug does not deliver the small shock a synthetic one will in January.

It takes up odour rather than passing it on. The fibre binds odour molecules inside its structure and holds them, which is why a sheepskin airs out rather than needing to be washed. Most of its cleaning is done by a cold afternoon outdoors.

It quietly cleans the air. Wool absorbs certain pollutants from indoor air - formaldehyde among them - and binds them into the fibre. A rug is a very slow filter you walk on.

Why it lasts

Back to the crimp. A fibre that grows as a spring behaves like one: compress it and it returns. A wool fibre can be bent and released tens of thousands of times and still recover its shape, which is why a sheepskin that has lived under a chair for ten years comes back when you move the chair, and a synthetic pile does not.

This is the least glamorous thing wool does and the most important one. A material that recovers is a material you do not replace. Most of what we throw away from our houses is not broken — it is flattened, matted, gone grey, no longer nice. Wool simply takes much longer to reach that point.

Where ours comes from

Our sheepskin is a by-product of the food industry. The animals are not raised for their skins; the skins would otherwise be waste. The sheep are also sheared every season to maintain their health, thus leaving us with their wooly coats they no longer need.

It is tanned by a supplier holding Woolmark certification for pure new wool pile, OEKO-TEX for materials in contact with skin, and ISO 9001 for process. Their factories are audited through SEDEX under the SMETA standard, which covers labour and working conditions as well as environment. Our core range is tanned chrome-free.

We name the certifications rather than the sentiment because certifications can be checked and sentiment cannot.

And at the end

Wool is keratin - the same protein as your own hair. Left in soil, it breaks down, and what it leaves behind is nitrogen the ground can use. It does not fragment into microplastic, because there is no plastic in it to fragment.

That applies to wool buried in the ground, not to a rug on a floor. A sheepskin in a house is not quietly decomposing underneath you. It is doing the opposite, for decades, which is rather the point.

It is also worth saying plainly: the most environmentally useful thing any object in a house can do is last long enough that it never needs replacing. Wool's case is not that it disposes of well. It is that it postpones disposal for a very long time.

None of this is seasonal

Every property described here is a property of the fibre. The fibre does not know what month it is.

The sheepskin on your floor in July was regulating moisture, absorbing sound and holding its shape exactly as it will in January. It was keeping a hot room comfortable rather than a cold one, which is the same mechanism working in the other direction.

What changes in October is the house. The floors get colder than the air in the room, usually before anyone turns the heating on. The chair by the window starts getting used again now the garden has closed. The rooms get smaller and more occupied.

So this is not the month wool arrives. It is the month the house arranges itself around what was already there.